Tag Archives: social-security

Assignment Desk: Is Obama More Polarizing Than Past Presidents?

Mother Jones

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Paul Waldman notes a recent poll that shows declining public support for the idea of giving undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. In a familiar dynamic, though, this is mainly because Republican support has cratered since President Obama announced his executive order on immigration:

Before this latest immigration controversy, Republican voters were at least favorably inclined toward a path to citizenship. But then Barack Obama moves to grant temporary legal status to some undocumented people (and by the way, nothing he’s doing creates a path to citizenship for anyone, but that’s another story). It becomes a huge, headline-dominating story, in which every single prominent Republican denounces the move as one of the most vile offenses to which the Constitution has ever been subjected.

….What the Quinnipiac poll suggests — and granted, this is only one poll and we won’t know for sure until we get more evidence — this process also ends up shifting people’s underlying beliefs about the issue. In this case, the controversy makes Republicans more conservative

This, of course, is something that we’ve seen over and over, and it presents President Obama with an impossible dilemma. If he says nothing about an issue, he forfeits the chance to move public opinion. But if he speaks out, the subject instantly morphs into a partisan battering ram. Republicans will oppose his proposal regardless of how they felt about it before.

But I’m curious about whether this dynamic is stronger under Obama compared to other presidents. I figured Social Security privatization might be a good test, but I wasn’t able to dig up consistent poll information about it from before and after George Bush’s big push following the 2004 election. However, this is from Gallup’s Frank Newport in February 2005:

Basic support for the idea of privatizing Social Security has been at the majority level for well over a decade….But in the much more politicized environment of the last several months, survey questions asking about Social Security privatization show widely varying support levels.

….It is important to note that the privatization issue is rapidly becoming more partisan. The concept is now being actively promoted by a Republican president, and widely criticized by his Democratic congressional opposition. This suggests that public opinion on Social Security could devolve into nothing more than a referendum on the president.

This suggests, unsurprisingly, that Bush polarized public opinion in the same way Obama does. Perhaps all presidents do. Still, it sure seems as if Obama polarizes more than any previous president. I can think of several reasons this might be true:

Something to do with Obama himself. This could be anything from underlying racism to the nature of Obama’s rhetoric.
Our media environment has become increasingly loud and partisan over time, and this naturally polarizes opinions more than in the past.
The Republican Party has simply become more radicalized over the past decade or so.
In the past, liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats acted as natural brakes on viewing everything through a purely partisan lens. But party and ideology have been converging for decades, and this naturally makes every issue more partisan.

In any case, this would be an interesting project for someone with access to high-quality polling data that reaches back over several decades. Is the partisan response to President Obama’s proposals more pronounced than it was for previous presidents? If so, is it a little more pronounced, or a lot? Someone needs to get on this.

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Assignment Desk: Is Obama More Polarizing Than Past Presidents?

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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

Mother Jones

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Via Matt Yglesias, here’s a fascinating little study in behavioral economics. It involves Social Security, which currently allows you to retire at age 62, but offers you a higher monthly payment if you retire later. For example, if you retire at 62, your monthly benefit might be $1,500, but if you delay a year, your monthly benefit might go up to $1,600. Given average lifespans, the total payout works out the same in both scenarios.

But what if you offered retirees a different deal? What if, instead of a higher monthly benefit, you offered them a lump sum payout if they delayed retirement? In the example above, if you delay retirement to 63, you’ll still get $1,500 per month, but you’d also get a $20,000 lump sum payout. Delay to age 70 and you’d get a lump sum of nearly $200,000. How do people respond to that?

It turns out that they delay retirement—or they say they would on a survey, anyway. Under the current scenario, people say they’d retire at 45 months past age 62, or 65 years and 9 months. Under the lump sum scenario, the average retirement age is about five months later. (A third scenario with a delayed lump sum payout motivates people to retire even later.)

Would people do this in real life if they were offered these options? Maybe. And it would probably be a good thing, as Yglesias explains:

Since the benefits would be actuarially fair, this would not save the government any money. But since people would be working longer, the overall size of the economy and the tax base would be larger. That extends the life of the Social Security Trust Fund, and helps delay the moment at which benefit cuts or tax increases are necessary. The overall scale of the change is not enormous, but it’s distinctly positive and it’s hard to see what the downside would be.

This is hardly the highest priority on anybody’s wish list, but it’s an intriguing study. And it would certainly be easy to implement. Maybe it’s worth a try.

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Here’s an Interesting Twist on Social Security That Might Be Worth Trying

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America Does Not Really Have a Big Aging Problem

Mother Jones

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This isn’t exactly breaking news, but the Census Bureau released a report on America’s aging population today, and the basic takeaway is something we already know: as the Baby Boomers age, our population is going to get steadily older. However, what’s less widely recognized is that this is only true for the next couple of decades. After 2030, our elderly population stabilizes at about one-third the size of the working-age population.

In other words, all the sturm and drang over Social Security aside, our demographic problem isn’t really that bad. What’s more, compared to other countries, our outlook is positively sunny. Take a look at the red bars in the chart on the right. They show the projected size of the elderly population in various developed countries in 2050, and the United States is in by far the best shape. Our elderly population stabilizes in 2030 at about 21 percent of the total population, a number that’s significantly lower than even the second-best country (Britain, at 24 percent). Most other countries not only have elderly populations that are far larger, but their elderly populations are growing. These countries have demographic problems.

It’s worth driving this point home: America doesn’t really have a huge aging problem. We have a very moderate aging problem, which could be handled in the federal budget with fairly modest changes to Social Security and Medicare. What we do have is a health care problem. But that’s a problem for us all.

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America Does Not Really Have a Big Aging Problem

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Big Government Run Amok Decides to Back Down

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post gets results!

The Social Security Administration announced Monday that it will immediately cease efforts to collect on taxpayers’ debts to the government that are more than 10 years old.

….“I have directed an immediate halt to further referrals under the Treasury Offset Program to recover debts owed to the agency that are 10 years old and older pending a thorough review of our responsibility and discretion under the current law,” Social Security’s acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said in a statement.

So there you have it. If your mother—maybe, possibly—got overpaid 40 years ago when you were a five-year-old child, the Social Security Administration will no longer seize your tax refund check in order to recover her alleged debt. Progress!

Anyway, Eric Posner says the government’s legal position here was untenable all along. That’s good to know.

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Big Government Run Amok Decides to Back Down

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Chart of the Day: Social Security Is More Important Than Most People Think

Mother Jones

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EBRI’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey is out, and you can find it here if you want to read the whole thing. In a nutshell, retirement confidence dropped sharply in 2008 when the Great Recession started, and finally started to increase a bit this year for the first time since then. Nonetheless, the number of people who are confident they have enough to retire on is still around 55 percent, way below the 70 percent number that felt this way during the 90s and aughts.

There are plenty of interesting facts and figures about retirement in the report, and I’ve excerpted an interesting pair of charts about worker expectations below. These numbers have bounced around a bit over the years, but generally speaking, only about a third of active workers think Social Security will be a major part of their retirement. In reality, about two-thirds of actual retirees report that Social Security is a major part of their income. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone blithely talking about cutting Social Security benefits, especially among low-income workers.

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Chart of the Day: Social Security Is More Important Than Most People Think

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